EmFi - Emergency Finance

The goal of EmFi (Emergency Finance) is to develop efficient and trustable financial instruments to support immediate economic interventions in the Covid-19 post-acute scenario of relaxation of the lock-down. EmFi is centred on the development of a special-purpose virtual currency, for the accountable and frictionless exchange of resources, services, assets, claims and goods among institutions, citizens and companies. EmFi targets specific programs designed by local authorities to tackle the socio-economic crisis, and reacts to the urgency for early and concrete implementation of financial support instruments: i. EmFi aims to define a set of essential elements supporting early intervention, including: the design of a suitable special-purpose community currency; the definition of efficient and accountable operational procedures allowing beneficiaries to be identified and resources to be linked to the special-purpose currency and administered as appropriate. ii. EmFi will develop a concrete use case. Local authorities are emerging as potential effective administrators of support interventions, given their direct link with citizens, companies and territories. Importantly, they are all well coordinated through a cohesive network of local administrators, which would facilitate “horizontal” scalability of adoption. iii. EmFi will address and validate desirable properties of the financial intervention. These include adequate privacy-preserving accountability; fraud avoidance; efficient identification of targeted beneficiaries; validation of the use of resources, connecting funds to goals in a demonstrable way; financial inclusion - covering also unregistered workers and the unbanked ones.